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Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#261

Post by judge2020 »

GoofballJones wrote: post #236
Drew_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its pretty straight forward that privacy protection for Google means protecting the data it has collected from their users. Not refraining or preventing itself from collecting user data. Google protects the privacy of your information from outsiders (and insiders) not from its own apps and services. That is what's meant when Google says they "take their user's privacy very seriously". And its obvious that thi…

"We take very seriously your privacy and we make sure no one can see what you do...because THAT'S OUR JOB! Hey, you want to know what our customers are doing, we're more than willing to sell you the data and telemetry we collect, but ya gotta go through us! We take that very seriously."

> we're more than willing to sell you the data and telemetry we collect

Except they don't, they sell access to targeting based on that data. Google's entire valuation is based on the data they have on users, if others could come in and scoop it up, they would have an instant competitor. I think calling it 'privacy' is the wrong word - Google takes data security and access control seriously, and only Legal and a dozen engineers can actually access data (and even then, it'd be logged and looked into if it was out of the ordinary).

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/gsuite.google.com...

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#262

Post by neolog »

dcow wrote: post #257
edgyquant wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate that “reasonably think” defense. Yes most people, including myself, did think that vitamin water was healthy until reading the nutritional sheet. It’s one step away from selling chocolate as, “good for you bars,” and claiming no reasonable person would think they’re good for you.

I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This d…

> It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins.

water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name.

People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#263

Post by Xelynega »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #215
cookiengineer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the future in order to stay private online, there's no way unless web traffic is decentralized off their servers. That is the real power behind a peer-to-peer system in my opinion: Offloading, and therefore removing the capabilities to track anything as a single node in the system. The only issue is peer-to-peer transport encryption, which can be solved if done correctly. Something like "statistically corr…

If a peer to peer system of interest caught on, I'm sure google would be glad to run 90% of the nodes (incognito) to have some view of what's happening therein.

All they would have to do is "support" the p2p network in chrome/chromium and because of the ease of use the majority of p2p nodes will be running code written by Google.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#264

Post by Xelynega »

amelius wrote: post #112
clairity wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but it’s essentially a social/legal problem, not a technical one. the onus is on the company holding data to show the chain of consent, which doesn’t require anything fancy outside a purpose-built database.

So how does that work then? How does Google prove that I clicked that accept-EULA button? Or that I approve of them keeping track of my information? I never put my signature anywhere and still there are companies holding or even trading my information. > it’s essentially a social/legal problem, not a technical one And ironically, it's the tech companies who are getting away with it.

For software that doesn't require you to click a EULA button or change a value in a EULA file to acknowledge you agree to the EULA, they can just make it part of the Terms Of Service that you inherently agree to by using their software/service.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#265

Post by Xelynega »

jonny_eh wrote: post #243
kache_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through this and then realized that apple hardware is not meant for people who like to actually do things with their computers

> do things with their computers Do we mean "do thing to their computers"?

You can do anything you want to you computers, Apple won't send men in black after you if you open up your device(although they will make the parts impossibly hard to get ahold of). The issue is that apple won't let me execute any code I want on the phone/computer that I own, which is preventing me from doing something with my computer that I want to.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#266

Post by jrnichols »

howzitallworkeh wrote: post #95
sunstone wrote: post #3

I've had a string of Google phones going back to the Nexus 5x but, for the very reasons laid out in this article, my next phone will likely be from Apple. That will be my first Apple product.

Unfortunately, you will find iOS bad in different ways. For example: you cannot install NoScript, or anything like it, on an iOS browser. You must choose between "all JS on" or "all JS off", and third-party browsers like Firefox are crippled because Apple forces all iOS browsers to use their WebKit engine under the hood. The myriad of Safari "content blocker" apps are also pretty dismal, and often expensive. So ad-bl…

> The myriad of Safari "content blocker" apps are also pretty dismal, and often expensive. So ad-blocking is difficult as well.

Not really. Firefox Focus is free and does a great job. Nomorobo is a call filtering service and it's $20/year, and it also does a great job of blocking ads & other objects.

ka-block does a good job and it's free.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#267

Post by Xelynega »

toastal wrote: post #12
chimen wrote: post #4

Even attempting to stay private gets you banned on most services.

Ran into this today logging into PayPal (the password-must-be-8-20-characters payment service) for the first time in a long time to buy a band t-shirt. After jumping through two different types of CAPTCHAs, now they require you share your phone number to log in. I contacted support via Twitter saying they have my email if they want to verify a login because I'm not comfortable with SIM jacking nor how data-mining is…

This is my issue with authy(the 2fa provider that twitch and others use). TOTP needs 2 things to function, a shared secret and a synced clock. No phone number. No email. No account. No personal information. All you need is a secure connection to send a 16-32 bytes of data and to both have synced with an NTP server recently, yet there's no way to get the shared secret from authy without giving out personal information.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#268

Post by dcow »

neolog wrote: post #262
dcow wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This d…

> It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name. People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.

What would be an appropriate name?

To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.

Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#269

Post by Xelynega »

kaba0 wrote: post #216
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've internalised the adage "Don’t listen to what people/corporations say, watch what they do" and found it very useful to see through these fancy statements. It's especially useful at workplace to observe what people do and understand the politics. And at a different level observing how Google was acting more evil by the day made me completely switch over to the Apple ecosystem.

Corporations after a certain size become essentially AIs without moral values maximizing profit. It’s funny how some fear the paper clip AI, when capitalism is exactly that. Any decision that seems to be in good moral is simply based on which direction is more profitable, eg, can Company get away in terms of public image with a non-moral decision, or would it then away more potential buyer?

Not even just after a certain size, the current trend in society is to quantify everything so that it can be optimized. There's many companies(like kausa.ai) which focus on quantifying, measuring, and optimizing every facet of your business that they can, no matter the size.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#270

Post by boibombeiro »

dcow wrote: post #268
neolog wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name. People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.

What would be an appropriate name? To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allo…

A fantasy name like most soft drinks
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